“For once, I have to say I agree with your daughter, Khoulter,” the Widow declared, one hand clutched to her waist. A displeased air accompanied her revelation. She fanned herself despite the chill sweeping across the Termonglen plain.
Khoulter grunted and hurled his snot into a rag before grimacing at the tent flaps.
Yesenia would never understand how Korah and Khoulter had been raised in the same household.
“Your opinion doesnae alter the vow I made to the...” Khoulter’s eyes flared in defiance. “King.”
“He cannae hear ye, Father,” Yesenia bitterly retorted. “You donnae have to call him thus. That is unless he’s your mate now?”
“Yesenia,” Khallum warned.
Yesenia threw her arms out. “Ah, well I’m glad someone here is happy. A little too eager to stick it to that redheaded lass though, aye?”
“I’m not pleased about it either,” he grumbled. “A Northerlander... in the Southerlands...”
“Still somehow better than a Southerlander in the Easterlands.”
“Asherley seems interesting,” Byrne said, then ducked from the looks leveled at him by both siblings. “We didnae get to say much, in the tent, but she was kind.”
“Until she drops wolfsbane into your porridge,” Yesenia countered. “You do know you’re wedding a poison mistress, I ken?”
Byrne shook his head into his sigh.
“What did the... king say to the four of you, Father? In the tent?” Khallum asked. “How did he convince you to sell yer own kin?”
“Sell my...” Khoulter knocked his ale from the table. “Is that what ye think, son? That ye were all bought and paid for?”
Yesenia lifted her chin. “We donnae know what to think! Before this afternoon, I was happily unwed, sneaking about with Erran Rutland in the cove. And now, you’ve married me to our sworn enemy?”
“Sneaking about... with Erran?” Khoulter squinted at her. His dubious look dissolved in favor of a more pressing one. “There was nothing exchanged. No offer could have swayed me to sell my own children.”
“Yet ye did,” the Widow said, with a smile Yesenia wanted to knock from her face, whether she agreed with her or not. “I’d just about concluded negotiations for Khallum’s marriage to Sessaly Rutland.”
“Are ye out of your mind, woman? Why did I even let you come here?” He dismissed her with his hand, though she only backed up and planted herself in a nearby chair. “There was no offer, only a demand. A test. Are we with him or against him. No more or less.”
“Against!” Yesenia cried out, laughing. “Isnae a hard question, Father.”
“But are we? Really?” Khoulter leaned against the table, weary. “It’s as we talked about, before we left Warwicktown. There isnae a chance of us winning anything but a war on words. We have no allies but our own people, and even they’ve begun to dull their anger toward the crown that takes so much from them. What’s the past to them, when the present has them wondering after their next meal?”
“I knew it. I knew this was a trap.”
“Aye? Lotta good knowing did us,” her father replied. “Even a keen rat still takes the cheese.”
“Well, I willnae go to Whitechurch. He can come to the Southerlands.”
“You will go.” Each of Khoulter’s words was heavier than his last. “As will Byrne.”
“Byrne? But he’s a man! The Blackwood girl will come to him, as she should.”
“She’s the Blackwood heir. He will leave when you do.”
Yesenia’s head shook so fast, her vision blurred. There were tears, but she’d offer them no address. “Why are you...” She struggled for breath. “Giving them everything they asked for? What do you get in return?”
Khoulter looked at his crossed feet. “I ken knowing my children are not the enemies of the king, as I’ve been, was all I needed in return.”
Yesenia glared at her father. “How nice for you, that you had the luxury of deciding for us all.” She ran from the tent before her tears could overcome her will.
“I just don’t understand. I don’t understand.” Chasten moved aggressively from one end of their tent to the other, stopping only for sighs. “Not even a warning. A hint. Perhaps we missed a raven...”
“We missed nothing,” Mariana said, her teeth clenched.
“We must have! There’s no other explanation. Khain would have wanted us to know. To be prepared.”
“At the very least he could’ve let us pick our brides,” Aiden muttered. He quaffed what remained in the wine carafe and let it fall to the ground. “The middle daughter of Lord Blackwood? Really? Ignoring the obvious slight, we know how the Blackwoods are. It may have been her father who joined you and the other lords in the tent, but everyone knows it’s the women who rule the west.” He shook his head. “I’ll have my work cut out, no doubt.”
“Could be worse. Could be a Warwick,” Chasten replied. “In our house. There will be a cursed Warwick in our house!” He feigned a smile his younger son’s way. “It will be fine, Corin. We’ll prepare you for it.”
Corin found his sister huddled in the corner. None of the others had time for her turmoil, of what it would mean for her to leave her love behind and move to the cold, unforgiving north, with a man she’d spent an hour with.
Despite his family’s glances his way through most of their conversation, Corin had said nothing in the rapid exchange. His thoughts had moved on to the trial awaiting him.
He’d never leave Whitechurch. Never get away from the Quinlandens and their grasping, cloying ways.
“Sending Gretchen out of the Easterlands will not do at all.” Chasten seemed to be just getting started, collecting energy from around himself. “We need the payment for her. The Sylvaines would pay double.”
“I’m sure the king will pay us a bounty,” Aiden said.
“No,” Chasten answered, bewildered despite his anger. “No, he claims we have all been offered something of equal value, and thus any gold changing hands is unnecessary. We will receive a bride without so much as a scrap of silver, and we’ll send one without receiving any benefit. It’s madness. It goes against the Accord, the agreement that the king shall not tread upon the customs of his Reaches, so long as our taxes are paid on time and—”
“We go home,” Mariana said, her voice heavy with reason, stability. “We go home. We pack Gretchen’s trunk. We prepare for the arrival of our foreign brides. That’s all there is. Anything more does nothing to help us. We must focus on what needs to be done.” She nodded. “That’s right. That’s what we do.”
“I need to speak with the king,” Chasten asserted. “Alone.”
“You will do no such thing,” Mariana countered. Aiden started in, as if to scold her for speaking to him so, but she was ready for him. “You are both beholden to emotion at present.”
Aiden scoffed. “And you’re not?”
“A woman always does what a woman must,” Mariana calmly answered. “Chasten, if you go to him now, he will see you at your weakest. You will say things you must never say. You do understand that?”
Chasten nodded, crossing his arms and facing away from them all.
“The king must never see you as anything but his agreeable ally. His most trusted man. His unflappable champion. You can endure anything he gives you. He knows that, and so must you.”
“Father already knows all this,” Aiden said.
“Of course he does,” she replied, looking at her husband. “Everything we already know requires reminder, on occasion.”
Aiden spun away from their strange energy and licked his lips at Corin. “Don’t look so pathetic, brother. You got the best of the lot. Warwicks are feral. You know what that means.”
Corin swallowed and thought of Venya climbing higher and higher at Arboriana, farther than Corin would follow with his great fear of heights. The Sylvan Prince, she’d called him, her last words before he saw her for the last time, lying upon the grass in a pool of her own blood.
“If nothing else, your nights will be satisfying.” Aiden shook his head as if imagining it. “Just don’t go falling in love with her.”
“What?”
“You fall for anything that looks at you, like the merchant girl.”
Corin looked away. “That’s not true.”
“Did you or did you not stick it to her, before she went sailing from the branches?”
“No, never,” Corin said. Why he confirmed his truth to the one person who would use it to hurt him, he didn’t know. Maybe that was what he wanted. To be hurt. To know pain as Venya had, because pain was, at the very least, something else to focus on.
“Shame,” Aiden said, chuckling. “Still. The Warwicks are our enemies. Never forget it.”
“How could I?” Corin grimaced at his brother. “When it’s all you and Father can talk about?”
Aiden knelt and picked up the dusty wine carafe. He shoved it at Corin’s chest. “You want to mope and brood? Then do it while you fetch us more wine.”
Yesenia found the Blackwood girl in the menagerie, an unkempt garden of animals carved from bushes. Someone must have tended it once, for the lions and bears were at least somewhat discernible. Who had bothered to create such an ambitious piece of work in the shadow of the abandoned, forsaken keep was a question for another girl, in another time, in another life.
“Asherley, aye?” Yesenia approached the dark-haired heir to the Blackwoods with barely repressed fury. Asherley was pretty, in the same way Khallum’s new wife, Gwyn, was pretty. But when she looked toward the sound of her name, there was an iciness to her gaze, a hardness that promised to reveal more only to anyone who had earned the privilege of closeness.
“What a strange place,” Asherley replied after a silent appraisal of Yesenia. “Who would bother, all the way out here?”
“You cannae take him to the Westerlands. I willnae allow it.”
Asherley folded her shawl over herself and looked up from where she was seated, at the base of an elk-kind missing an antler. “That isn’t for you to decide, Yesenia. Any more than I have any say in seeing both my sisters sent off to foreign houses.”
“Byrne is a man,” she said, when what she wanted to say was Byrne is a boy.
“And we are the Westerlands.”
Yesenia snorted. “I’ve heard of what the women are like there.”
Asherley grinned. She clutched her skirt when a wind tore down the plain. “Jealous, are you?”
“I have all I need.”
“Pray that the Quinlandens allow you to keep it in the Easterlands. Poor Maeryn.” She briefly closed her eyes.
“You’ll unnerve him, Asherley. He’s hardly had time to learn to be a man, and you’d take what little he possesses.”
Asherley pivoted on the topiary bench. “I’m not your enemy, Yesenia.”
“You’re the second person to say that to me today.”
Asherley shrugged. “I can only speak for myself. We all lost something here. Lick your wounds and find your way.” She returned to staring off into the forest. “As we all must.”
Yesenia, flustered, turned to leave, but Asherley stood instead.
“My family will be expecting me. Enjoy the silence, for all that it lasts.”
Asherley returned to the sea of tents as Yesenia stewed in her grudging realization that silence was precisely what she needed most right now.
But she was not alone for long.
Yesenia heard him before she saw him. It started with a grunt and escalated to a scream and then a glass bottle hurled through the air. She watched it sail over the topiary fish and land in the tail of the donkey.
“Oh, I...” Corin flushed. She was starting to take his habit, of doing that every time he saw her, as a personal slight. “I didn’t think anyone would be out here.”
“I was just leaving.” Yesenia started to rise.
“No! I mean, you don’t have to. Not on my account.”
“It wasnae on your account,” she replied. “Nor anyone’s but my own.”
Corin rushed to speak. “My father was blindsided by the king. I was right about that. He was just as taken aback as the other lords.”
Yesenia balked. She dropped her elbows onto her knees. “Why would you tell me that?”
Corin shrugged. He took a seat amidst what must have been a family of ducks, once. He squinted into the setting sun. “He thinks you’ll spy on us.”
Yesenia laughed. “Aye, ye can bet on it.”
“He’s already preparing Gretchen to spy on the Derehams.”
“That bootlicker may be a treasonous weasel, but he’s no fool.” Yesenia waited for Corin to bristle. He didn’t. “You’re going to let me talk about your father like that?”
“I’ll stop you when you’ve said something out of order.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re a strange boy.”
“You’re not quite like any girl I’ve ever met either.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Good.” Corin glanced at her with a quick smile. His azure eyes sparkled in the twilight. His skin was so pale and smooth, he looked more like the dolls Korah had tried to buy for her when she was little. She was beginning to understand what they said about Quinlandens when they called them ethereal and otherworldly.
“I worry you won’t like Whitechurch.”
Yesenia reared back. “Of all the things that have happened today, that’s what worries ye? That I’ll nay take to your little fiefdom in the trees?”
“You’re my wife now, aren’t you?”
She cackled. “Donnae hang your hopes on that.”
“You know a way out of it?”
“I will when I find it.”
Yesenia thought he looked almost disappointed. It didn’t last. Relief flooded Corin’s face fast enough for her to take offense.
“I won’t be surprised when you do. You’re more clever than I am, Yesenia.”
He clapped his hands on his thighs and rose. She noted that he didn’t look at her. Even when reveling in the tantalizing idea of a reprieve from marriage to her, he hadn’t looked at her. She was used to men being afraid of her, but this wasn’t that. She sensed the difference, even if she couldn’t define it.
“Over there. Atop the donkey’s arse.” She pointed past where he was looking. “Is where it landed.”
“Thank you,” he said, turning toward where she pointed. “And Yes—”
Yesenia heard his words die on his tongue as she left him to return to her family.